ADDING AND CONFIGURING ZONES
A zone is a user-defined group of cameras that are triggered to record when specific events occur. For example, you might create a Door 3 zone that contains all cameras near Door 3. Then, when the door is opened, all cameras in the Door 3 zone begin recording video. The Event History page in the Digital Sentry client software allows you to search by zone for alarm events. For example, you could search for all video recorded when Door 3 was open by choosing the Door 3 zone as part of your search parameters. A zone can contain any number of cameras.
To create a zone, right-click the Zones directory in the directory tree and select Add Zone. When the Add Zone dialog box appears (refer to Figure 23), enter the following information:
Figure 23. Add Zone Dialog Box
•Zone Name: A name that describes the zone’s location or other characteristic.
•Zone Description: Any description identifying the zone.
•Alarm Information:
–Active: Activates the zone.
–Report Alarm: Automatically displays an alarm notification in the Current Alarms window whenever an alarm event occurs within the zone.
–Record Until RESET Received: Changes the beginning of the post-alarm recording period. If you select this option, post-alarm recording does not begin until the alarm is reset to its normal state. Otherwise, the post-alarm recording period begins when the alarm is triggered.
–Priority: Determines how alarms from this zone are sorted in the Current Alarms window. Alarms notifications from zones with Priority 1 are listed at the top of the Current Alarms window.
•Alarm Time in Seconds:
–Pre-alarm:Indicates how much of the video captured before the alarm occurs is inserted at the beginning of a video segment of an alarm event within this zone.
–Post-alarm:Indicates how much of the video captured after the alarm occurs is appended to the end of a video segment of an alarm event within this zone.
–Re-alarm:Indicates how long after an alarm occurs that ensuing alarms are ignored. For example, if you enter 5 seconds, alarms that are active less than 5 seconds after an initial alarm event do not trigger recording.
After you enter this information, click Save to add the zone to the Zones directory in the directory tree.
NOTE: When creating a zone for the recording of video loss events, be sure to include an additional three seconds to account for the maximum lag between the loss of video and the triggering of the alarm. (The system monitors for video loss every 1.5 seconds.) For example, if you want to record 5 seconds of pre-alarm video on the zone, set the pre-alarm time to 8 seconds.
